The one area where the government had made headway was incarceration. Federal prisons with a capacity of 28,000 already held 33,135 prisoners in 1986. By 1987, their population had grown to 48,300. The population of state prisons was 470,659 in 1986. It grew to 533,309 by 1987. That year, the Justice Department estimated that at least half the individuals entering America’s prisons would be drug offenders by the end of the decade. It was the acceleration of a maddening dynamic, one wherein Black communities were overpoliced and overincarcerated but still underprotected.
